Frunze took part in the Moscow insurrection in 1905 and, after frequent arrests for revolutionary activity, escaped in 1915 to conduct agitation in the Russian army, first on the western front and, after the February 1917 Revolution, in Belorussia (now Belarus). He became one of the outstanding commanders of the Civil War, commanding, in turn, the eastern front against Admiral A.V. Kolchak in 1919 and the southern front, where General P.N. Wrangel was routed, in 1920. He became deputy people’s commissar for war in March 1924 and replaced Leon Trotsky as people’s commissar for war in January 1925. In 1924 he also became a candidate member of the Politburo.

Frunze was one of a group that opposed Trotsky’s views during the Civil War and, in consequence, won the support of Joseph Stalin, who ensured his advance after 1921. He was the author of the “unitary military doctrine,” according to which the army should be trained throughout in a spirit of offensive action, united by its ideology and by its determination to carry out the task of the Communist Party—the promotion of world revolution. This could not, in his view, be achieved so long as the army was commanded by officers of the old imperial army, whom Trotsky, of practical necessity, had put in command of the new Red Army after 1918. Frunze asserted that the form of the Soviet military establishment should flow directly from the revolutionary and class character of the Soviet state. He helped lay the basis for a permanent and efficient peacetime Soviet military machine by introducing peacetime compulsory military service and by standardizing military formations, drills, and uniforms.